quarta-feira, 23 de maio de 2012

TEDxMonterey - Melissa Garren - The Sea We've Hardly Seen

Melissa is interested in the many ways
that microscopic organisms support the health and vitality of our
oceans. Although invisible to the naked eye, there are five million
bacteria and fifty million viruses in an average teaspoon of clean
seawater. These unseen communities are the masterminds behind the
beautiful blue, vibrant, productive oceans we can see with our naked
eyes. Much of her work to date has focused on the ways in which coastal
pollution disturbs these healthy microbial processes, particularly on
coral reefs, with the aim of finding more sustainable solutions for land
and coastal water use practices. She is currently delving deeper into
coral-microbe interactions by studying the ways humans can influence
individual pathogen behavior. As a postdoctoral fellow at the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology, she is applying cutting edge
microfluidic technologies to understand how and why microbial diseases
are infecting so many corals around the globe. By combining tools from
engineering and biophysics, she is able to study coral disease at the
scale on which it actually occurs: the microscale. She ultimately hopes
to work at the interface of research and policy by facilitating the
integration of microbial processes into conservation planning. Melissa
holds a B.S. in molecular biology from Yale University and both an M.S.
and a Ph.D. in marine biology from Scripps Institution of Oceanography,
University of California San Diego.